8.1 Safe communication: Messaging

Two lovers stand in the bedroom gazing into each other's longing eyes. They move toward the bed, their bodies pulling closer like a magnet and a piece of iron. Their hearts thump like loudspeakers at a rock concert. Closer they move to the point of serious communiqu . Now, with lust in their hearts, they exchange their x.509 certificates and send an encrypted message of love.

Whew that was hot! What intense communication! Fortunately, our lovers practiced "safe communication." First they exchanged certificates and then consummated their communication. In this case, they set up a secure channel between themselves and established end-to-end privacy. This process involved using the certificates to identify themselves, after which they enabled SSL. And the data flowed in both directions. They lived happily ever after and were totally safe from all bugs and viruses that is, until one of them said, "I love you." Oops. I just crashed my partner and wiped out his/her hard drive. How can this be? All I did was forward the simple message "I love you." What happened?

The moral of our story is ... love hurts. No, wait, that's not it. The real lesson is that secure messaging is a battle against the elements, which include the following:

• Uninformed users

• Foolhardy administrators

• Premeditated attacks

• Bad use of messaging resources

• Limited implementation of messaging that is, not enough resources

Messaging is one of the most important mission-critical applications of the network era. For anyone who is not convinced, imagine shutting down...